The project, "Psychiatry in Boston, 1900-1925," is a history of psychiatric practice and psychiatric patients in early twentieth century Boston. Through a focus on one institution, the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, it examines the ideology of Progressive psychiatry and shows how that ideology was applied in practice. Material from hospital case records--medical and social histories, transcriptions of case conferences, letters patients wrote to psychiatrists, family members and friends--is used to reconstruct the practice of psychiatry and the experience of psychiatric patienthood. Statistics derived from descriptive and multivariate analysis of data drawn from a simple random sample of 1290 cases (from a total population of 17,000 admissions to the hospital from 1912 through 1921) are used to characterize the patient population and to assess the importance of such demographic variables as ethnicity, occupation, gender and age in determining patients' routes to the hospital, diagnoses, treatments and final dispositions. In addition, the project argues for a reconsideration of the issue of social control: it compares lay and medical views of symptoms and illness, of insanity and feeblemindedness; it examines the new diagnostic category of the psychopathic personality, used to classify lazy men and oversexed women; and it recreates the institutional culture of the Psychopathic Hospital. It attempts to present a comprehensive social, intellectual and institutional history of psychiatry in a major urban center in early twentieth century America.